In his biting satires he breathes still more of the spirit and stile of Juvenal, his third of this book being an imitation of that satirist’s eighth, on Family-madness and Pride of Descent; the beginning of which is not translated amiss by our author.  The principal object of his fourth satire, Gallio, would correspond with a modern Fribble, but that he supposes him capable of hunting and hawking, which are exercises rather too coarse and indelicate for ours:  this may intimate perhaps, that the reign of the great Elizabeth had no character quite so unmanly as our age.  In advising him to wed, however, we have no bad portrait of the Petit Maitre.

  Hye thee, and give the world yet one dwarfe more,
  Such as it got when thou thy selfe was bore.

His fifth satire contrasts the extremes of Prodigality and Avarice; and by a few initials, which are skabbarded, it looks as if he had some individuals in view; though he has disclaimed such an intention in his postscript (now the preface) p. 6. lin. 25, &c.  His sixth sets out very much like the first satire of Horace’s first book, on the Dissatisfaction and Caprice of mankind—­Qui fit Mecaenas; and, after a just and lively-description of our different pursuits in life, he concludes with the following preference of a college one, which, we find in the Specialities of his life, he was greatly devoted to in his youth.  The lines, which are far from inelegant, seem indeed to come from his heart, and make him appear as an exception to that too general human discontent, which was the subject of this satire.

  ’Mongst all these stirs of discontented strife,
  Oh let me lead an academick life;
  To know much, and to think we nothing know;
  Nothing to have, yet think we have enowe;
  In skill to want, and wanting seek for more;
  In weele nor want, nor wish for greater store. 
  Envy, ye monarchs, with your proad excesse,
  At our low sayle, and our high happinesse.

The last satire of this book is a severe one on the clergy of the church of Rome.  He terms it POMH-PYMH, by which we suppose he intended to brand Roma, as the Sink of Superstition.  He observes, if Juvenal, whom he calls Aquine’s carping spright, were now alive, among other surprising alterations at Rome,

—­that he most would gaze and wonder at, Is th’ horned mitre, and the bloody hat, The crooked staffe, their coule’s strange form and store, Save that he saw the fame in hell before.

The first satire of the fifth book is levelled at Racking Landlords.  The following lines are a strong example of the taste of those times for the Punn and Paronomasia.

  While freezing Matho, that for one lean fee
  Won’t term each term the term of Hillary,
  May now, instead of those his simple fees,
  Get the fee-simples of faire manneries.

The second satire lashes the incongruity of stately buildings and want of hospitality, and naturally reminds us of a pleasant epigram of Martial’s on the same occasion, where after describing the magnificence of a villa, he concludes however, there is no room either to sup or lodge in it.  It ends with a transition on the contumely with which the parasites are treated at the tables of the great; being a pretty close imitation of Juvenal on the same subject.  This satire has also a few skabbarded initials.